Farce

You can’t make this stuff up. It is a story that the Onion should be writing, but instead, we see it in the LA Times. You’ve read about the new $15 minimum wage the city is imposing on employers? And you’ve also likely heard that unions were big backers of its imposition.

Labor leaders, who were among the strongest supporters of the citywide minimum wage increase approved last week by the Los Angeles City Council, are advocating last-minute changes to the law that could create an exemption for companies with unionized workforces.

The push to include an exception to the mandated wage increase for companies that let their employees collectively bargain was the latest unexpected detour as the city nears approval of its landmark legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020.

For much of the past eight months, labor activists have argued against special considerations for business owners, such as restaurateurs, who said they would have trouble complying with the mandated pay increase.

But Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law.

Have you got that last part? Unions should have the leeway to negotiate a wage below the mandated minimum wage.

Why?

“With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them,” Hicks said in a statement. “This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement. And that is a good thing.”

Apparently only unions can do that sort of negotiation. The other dumb proles out there in fast food land, for instance, need the benevolent hand of government to mandate them out of a job.

The irony of that union boob’s statement is classic. Other than the minimum wage law, what would stand in the way of any business and any employee from doing that routinely on their own? Oh, yeah, nothing … well, except that absurd law, now.

But you have to hand it too the unions for having the absolute big brass ones to put this out there. They recognize the win-win nature of those sorts of negotiations – negotiations that in a free country would be unhampered by government interference. But they want to limit them … to themselves.

They also want a little political payback and a decided advantage when competing against non-unionized companies who might bid on jobs they want.

Quick hits on the last day you have, had, might have had, to sign up for your ObamaCare insurance. Curiously a rush of people appeared to sign up that I predict the Administration will report will carry them over the 7 millionlost policies, log ons ,applications, enrollments payed policy holder goal line. If anyone can recall 7 million was the original goal when this benevolent plan to help the uninsured portion of the population of the United States started. We should overlook the percentages of likely to use older and less healthy participants versus the younger will pay and never use participants and the predicted cost curves and such. If you have a plan and don’t like what they’re offering they promise you can keep your plan. Ha! Fooled you! It’s okay though, your old plan sucked whatever it was and whether you thought it did nor not.

At the pump gas prices are consistently higher over time under the current administration than the previous administration. But not the highest single spike and that’s what’s important. We can assume the personal finances of the President are secure as it was a well documented fact during the Bush administration that upticks in gas prices are the result of the President’s holdings in oil companies and his desire to make sure his retirement fund is well padded. Harry Reid said that when they rose under Bush, or someone said they heard Harry Reid say someone said that. Meanwhile in another energy independent decisive policy act the President is going to render a decision on the jobcreating, oil providing, Keystone pipeline at any moment. If you click on those links, you might want to jot down the dates on the articles for reference and hilarity. Continued samples of the brilliant ultra decisive actions we’ve come to expect from this President.

Environmentally the administration is rolling out a new plan to deal with global warming. It’s likely this plan will establish policies to deal with dangers such as earth quakes, meteor strikes, comets and other ill portents all suspected to be linked to man made catastrophic global warming by the consensus science community. Officially known as the American Economy Wrecking plan Climate Action Plan, they should consider calling it Obamafarts as a sort of short catchy handle that will appeal to the millenials almost as much as Pajama Boy did.

Speaking of American youth, they continued this last weekend to demonstrate their anger over being spied on, lied to and future taxed into oblivion by focusing on what’s important the same way the President uses his laser like focus to solve the country’s problems. Such a trend could, in as little as 300 years, lead to as broad a nationwide protest to the current government policies as was seen in the 60’s and 70’s during America’s involvement in Vietnam, though the former Soviet Union would need to rise up again and send us more campus agitators.

Finally the President’s 4 point approach to deal with America’s immigration problem is showing very positive signs in at least 2 of the 4 parts. Coupled with his crack down on companies that hire illegals, it was shown over the weekend by an independent study of ICE’s activities that the President can safely add the title “Deporter in Chief” to his list of accomplishments. We’re calling this latest ‘by Presidential order’ approach the “Catch and Release” mandate. It’s thought highly likely that once the mid-term elections are over the Administration (and the Republicans) will step up their efforts on part 3, “Streamlining Immigration” by declaring any individuals, living or deceased, in the continental US, it’s states, or territories on Jan 1st 2015 be recognized officially as American citizens. The President may extend the deadline to January 15th 2015 for those who thought about coming to the US, but couldn’t make it before the cutoff date.

Have a great day America.

UPDATE – April 1st

As my two Great Danes could have predicted – “With daily volumes continuing to surge, analysts believe the final tally could approach or even exceed an original goal of 7 million”

Now, don’t let the fact that the system was down for a good portion of the day deceive you. This “surprising” come back was destined, written, fated, according to prophecy, etc.

I wish the numbers in my checking account were as flexible as the numbers used by the Obama Administration.

How bad is it? Well, here’s a clip of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. In it, the group isn’t even polite about it – they simply point out that the administration is now engaged in lying about it’s rollout and the numbers involved. Even they can’t find it in themselves to prevaricate about what’s been going on. It’s a disaster and even the left can see that:

Usually, when something is so bad that it can’t be denied, even the left will finally admit it. Here’s that point. Two years after it was passed, two years of being able to enlist the help of world class contractors and putting a state-of-the art system together, what have we got?

The Edsel of systems. In fact, that’s not fair to Edsel. It at least ran.

Thomas Sowell, as he has so aptly and wonderfully done for decades, distills down some of the silliness that happens with the language of politics. He pens a short political glossary for those who need it. You can’t tell what a politician is saying without it.

One of the most versatile terms in the political vocabulary is "fairness." It has been used over a vast range of issues, from "fair trade" laws to the Fair Labor Standards Act. And recently we have heard that the rich don’t pay their "fair share" of taxes.

Some of us may want to see a definition of what is "fair." But a concrete definition would destroy the versatility of the word, which is what makes it so useful politically.

If you said, for example, that 46.7 percent of their income — or any other number — is the "fair share" of their income that the rich should have to pay in taxes, then once they paid that amount, there would be no basis for politicians to come back to them for more — and "more" is what "fair share" means in practice.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Dead on right and yes it is indeed a word that has become an “inexhaustible asset” to politicians of a certain ilk.

Racism:

"Racism" is another term we can expect to hear a lot this election year, especially if the public opinion polls are going against President Barack Obama.

Former big-time TV journalist Sam Donaldson and current fledgling CNN host Don Lemon have already proclaimed racism to be the reason for criticisms of Obama, and we can expect more and more other talking heads to say the same thing as the election campaign goes on. The word "racism" is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything — and demanding evidence makes you a "racist."

On the positive side, sort of, “compassion”:

A more positive term that is likely to be heard a lot, during election years especially, is "compassion." But what does it mean concretely? More often than not, in practice it means a willingness to spend the taxpayers’ money in ways that will increase the spender’s chances of getting reelected.

If you are skeptical — or, worse yet, critical — of this practice, then you qualify for a different political label: "mean-spirited." A related political label is "greedy."

In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be "greedy," while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show "compassion."

Make sure to read the rest.

Suffice it to say, Sowell nails it. Of course there are many other words and phrases that can be included as well. Language is malleable as our politicians prove every day. That’s why so many people listen and then point to Orwell’s “1984” after many political speeches today.

Some seriously screwed up history today from the One. President Obama was pitching hard, trying to again cast Republicans as backward looking types who were a problem for the county because they wanted to exploit fossil fuel (read the whole speech for that context). He decided to use the way-back machine and take us back to the 19th President of the US who was, surprise, a Republican.

Said Obama:

“One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: ‘It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?’" Obama said. "That’s why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore."

"He’s looking backwards, he’s not looking forward. He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something," Obama said.

So we called up the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where Nan Card, the curator of manuscripts, was plenty willing to correct Obama’s ignorance of White House history. Just as soon as she finished chuckling.

"I’ve heard that before, and no one ever knows where it came from," Card said of Hayes’s alleged phone remark, "but people just keep repeating it and repeating it, so it’s out there."

Wait, so Hayes didn’t even say the quote that Obama is mocking him for? "No, no," Card confirmed.

Point 2 – Hayes was a fan of the telephone:

She then read aloud a newspaper article from June 29, 1877, which describes Hayes’s delight upon first experiencing the magic of the telephone. TheProvidence Journal story reported that as Hayes listened on the phone, "a gradually increasing smile wreathe[d] his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes took the phone from his ear, "looked at it a moment in surprise and remarked, ‘That is wonderful.’"

Point 3 – Hayes was a forward thinking President who had quite a few firsts to include the first President with … wait for it … a telephone:

In fact, Card noted, Hayes was not only the first president to have a telephone in the White House, but he was also the first to use the typewriter, and he had Thomas Edison come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph. "So I think he was pretty much cutting edge," Card insisted, "maybe just the opposite of what President Obama had to say there."

But hey, don’t let the truth get in the way of a boffo rhetorical point.

0 for 3. By the way, Mr. Obama – this is one reason why you’ll never be on Mt. Rushmore either. And I assume your speech writer or researcher or both, are presently seeking new employment?

Powerline’s Steven Hayward brings us the results of a revealing paper by Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University. It attacks one of the popular myths that only dummies reject the “consensus” because they are ignorant of the science. Not so says the CCP:

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.

Hayward points out that these results validate an earlier finding from the journal Risk Analysis (2008):

By examining the results of a survey on an original and representative sample of Americans, we find that these three forces—informedness, confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy—are related in interesting and unexpected ways, and exert significant influence on risk assessments of global warming and climate change. In particular, more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.

Now one could conclude that it is actually the least informed who buy into the AGW because they’re less likely to seek out explanations to the underlying “science” that supports the theory. Instead they accept it whole cloth and defend it instead of taking a skeptical point of view – a view which science demands. Questioning the theory would also indicate intellectual curiosity instead of the rote acceptance of what is presented.

There’s a bit of irony to had here. Hayward:

Whoa there: The more science you know about climate change, the less likely you are to think it is a crisis? This suggest that all the money environmentalists have spent (I think the Environmental Defense Fund has spent $300 million alone on climate change) has had a negative effect on public opinion, and it offers the ironic possibility that the best thing Al Gore could do to advance his cause is shut up and grow his beard back in a Tibetan monastery.

It makes the case that a) the public isn’t stupid, b) propaganda is still mostly recognized as propaganda and c) the intellectually curious are more likely to be “skeptical” than the less intellectually curious.

I always love it when entertainers suddenly awaken and decide they must get involved in saving the planet.

This time it is Jeremy Irons. He’s decided there are just too many people on our little blue globe. Our lot’s numbers are “unsustainable”, although he’s pretty convinced some “big outbreak of something” will most likely happen because, you know, “the world always takes care of itself”. Of course, because Mother Gaia is a living breathing thinking world.

What he wants to do is make a film (naturally) which will be like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. A “documentary about sustainability and waste disposal in the vein of Michael Moore – but “not as silly”. Of course.

Irons describes himself as “deeply socialist” and is also concerned about world hunger. In a stirring and deeply touching (/sarc) call to action, Irons says on the website 1billionhungry.org:

“People around the world suffer hunger — 1 billion. Now that’s bad, worse than bad, that’s crazy! We’ve got to get mad. I want you to get mad. I want you to get up right now, stick your head out of the window and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell’.”

Original, edgy, a real difference maker. Of course it remains to be seen if Irons understands that the reason 1 billion are hungry has little to do with resources and much to do with politics.

Irons announced his new endeavor from one of his 7 houses:

The ultimate solution, he says, is for us all to live less decadently — growing our own food and recycling instead of replacing goods: “People must drop their standard of living [so] the wealth can be spread about. There’s a long way to go.”

And just as soon as you show us the way by flogging at least six of your houses, foregoing air travel, subsisting on berries, wild garlic and road kill, and dressing in polyester cast offs from your local charity shop, we’ll take you more seriously still.

Exactly. Delingpole wonders:

Could it be that “sustainability” is a concept one only truly understands when one has grown so incredibly rich that one is able to shelter from the consequences of one’s eco-fanaticism in the seclusion and comfort of one’s many agreeable homes?

Apparently. Delingpole points out that the UK’s new enviroment minister, Chris Huhne has that number of homes. And we know that Al Gore, the Pince of Wales and Zac Goldsmith aren’t far behind. And how knows how many Michael Moore has.